Monthly Archives: October 2016

Terresa Michuar White is a sculptor working in bronze and clay. She is Yup’ik Eskimo and French Canadian, born in the Kuskokwim River region near what is today the Alaskan village of Bethel. Inspired by the art of traditional Yup’ik mask-making and arctic carvings, Yup- ik stories of transformation between animal and human, and Northwest Coast Native design, Terresa works with a locally-mixed, earthenware clay to create multi-media masks and an oil-based clay figures. Her work is contemporary, exploring traditional themes and their interplay. The faces of her masks and the gestures of her figures emerge from memories; those passed to her by her ancestors and her own. “They are shadowy and I sense them dimly until they appear, recognizable at last, through my working of clay. I am inspired by Yup’ik stories of transformation. My work transforms me, brings me closer to ways of knowing and to the Alaskan village life I left as a young woman.”

Lynda Jikai Golan “We Didn’t Plan It” coffee, oil & water

Lynda Jikai Golan‘s medium is a mixture of coffee, oil and water. Trained as a painter and at UCLA, her work moved away from more traditional media when she became a resident at a Zen Center in Los Angeles. During that period, she became influenced by Sumi-e Ink Brush Calligraphy, and used it as a vehicle to speak to the themes she was most passionate about. “In this time of climate catastrophe and social upheaval, what is happening to our pale blue dot ?” Her images from the series, We Didn’t Plan-It, depict both chaos and pattern using spilt materials such as coffee, oil and water onto surfaces, bringing them into suggested, even familiar and pleasing forms, the unexpected and intentional always in relationship. My guide while working is to keep the designs vibrating between the raw material and my instant response, like the paintings of the great brush calligraphers, hundreds of years ago, whose work still vibrates with the intensity of split second decision.

FEATURE AREA (October 27-November 19)

Stacy Polson “Akiko and Simon” needle felted

Stacy Polson‘s medium is needle felting. Her work often gives the impression that one is viewing an illustration from a dramatically charged Japanese folk tale. Being a textile artist, she was naturally drawn to the beauty of kimonos and used their inspiration as a springboard to expand on their wildly clashing layers of color and graphics. Her medium, needle-felting (the act of interlocking fibers by stabbing them repeatedly with a barbed needle) allows her to paint or sculpt. And any encounter with fiber (natural or synthetic) raises the question: Can I felt this? Creating one of her wool paintings can take hours of work and literally thousands of stabs from start to finish, sometimes gently poking with a single fragile needle and other times pounding the canvas with scary, medieval looking tools.